Scars and stripes

He is fighting his last election battle. He has spent his entire life running for office but now, wounded by scandal, has had to cut back his act and stay behind closed doors, speaking only at big-ticket events. Jonathan Freedland, who has covered Bill Clinton's last four campaigns, assesses the mood of American voters who tomorrow will deliver their final judgment on the man they made their president

Scars and stripes

He is fighting his last election battle. He has spent his entire life running for office but now, wounded by scandal, has had to cut back his act and stay behind closed doors, speaking only at big-ticket events. Jonathan Freedland, who has covered Bill Clinton's last four campaigns, assesses the mood of American voters who tomorrow will deliver their final judgment on the man they made their president

Sunday 1 November 1998 20.49 EST
First published on Sunday 1 November 1998 20.49 EST

They love him, they hate him and they are standing just a few yards apart. In one cluster, perhaps two dozen Clinton fans cheering for their man, waving placards that read like valentines: 'San Francisco welcomes our President', 'People for Clinton' and, simply, 'Great Work, Bill!' Around the corner, caged behind police barriers, stand the Clinton-haters - the loud, angry Americans who have loathed the southern pretender since the day he burst onto the national stage seven years ago. They are chanting to the beat of a big bass drum: 'Two-Four-Six-Eight, married people shouldn't date' The men are smoking oversized, fake cigars; one holds a sign that declares: 'Clinton's legacy - The Disappearing Cigar Trick.' They have painted their placards themselves, most of them in lurid red. 'Liar Go Home', 'Impeach the Lying Lecher', and 'Time to Resign, Gore in '99'. A woman holds a banner that takes some working out, but which reads, 'Save us from further emBARE-ASSments, Impeach the Predator!' A young man addresses the First Lady: 'Hey Hillary, I hear OJ is looking for a new wife!' Another wears a Clinocchio T-shirt, depicting the president with an ever-expanding nose. Those who follow Bill Clinton have got used to this travelling piece of street theatre. Wherever he goes these days, different versions of this scene are played out. In one corner, dogged devotion; in the other, crude contempt. But Clinton will see neither for himself. For he shall be cocooned inside the Peacock Ballroom of the Mark Hopkins hotel, the smartest corner of the smartest venue in Nob Hill - the smartest neighbourhood in San Francisco. He will address about 400 of northern California's richest benefactors, walking away with close to $2 million for Democratic candidates who tomorrow will do battle in congressional and governors' races across the country. For an American president, this is standard fare. He is his party's biggest draw and fundraising comes with the job. But for Bill Clinton, the effort that culminates tomorrow means much more than that. For this is the fourth time he has travelled the length of the US, asking his fellow Americans for their votes. He did it for himself in 1992 and 1996 and for Democrats in the mid-terms of 1994. But he shall not do it again. In the election of 2000, Bill Clinton will be a non-combatant, retiring from the field. A man who has spent his entire life running for office - and who may well be the finest practitioner of electoral politics in the modern era - is facing up to an uncomfortable fact: this is his last campaign. It's also the last chance for Americans to deliver their verdict on only the third president in US history to face impeachment hearings. If it ever gets that far, it'll be America's 100 senators who serve as jurors, deciding the ultimate fate of the president. But tomorrow the voters will have their say, giving Bill Clinton a gentle thumbs-up - by keeping inevitable mid-term Democratic losses to a minimum - or a lethal thumbs-down, by sending a large new phalanx of Republicans to sit in judgment on Capitol Hill. The result is a campaign that has been not just a referendum on Zippergate and Kenneth Starr, but a chance to take a long, hard look at Bill Clinton. And, after a turbulent six years, Americans finally seem to have made up their minds on the man they made their president. Not that this has been a conventional Clinton campaign. In fact, the best performer in the business has had to cut back his act. Gone are the outdoor rallies, gone are the 1992 roadside attempts to shake every hand in sight. (Back then, Clinton told aides he genuinely believed he could win in New Hampshire - if he could only touch every voter in the state). The strategy for 1998 is to keep the president behind closed doors, addressing only big-ticket events like the one in San Francisco, or else 'doing the nation's business' in Washington. That's why Clinton staffers loved the 70-hour marathon negotiations on Middle East peace at the Wye Plantation in Maryland: they showed the president being presidential. Overt campaigning 'diminishes him,' explains one senior White House official. Democrats learned their lesson in 1994 when Clinton's barnstorming backfired, sending Newt Gingrich into the Speaker's chair. 'This time we don't want him looking like a partisan figure,' says the official. Now in the twilight of his presidency, Bill Clinton is supposed to be above party. He pulls off the act well. Inside the Peacock Room, among an entirely supportive audience, Clinton doesn't so much as mention the Republicans by name. He refers just once to the man challenging Barbara Boxer, California's incumbent Democratic Senator - but only to describe him as a 'worthy opponent'. Nor does he utter a word about Kenneth Starr or the impeachment axe hovering over his head. Even though there are protesters just outside, telling reporters that 'Bill Clinton has no honour, no integrity and he should resign,' the president himself sounds calm, and remarkably relaxed. That might be because Zippergate has not proved to be the assassin's bullet Clinton's Republican tormentors hoped for. On the contrary, few expect tomorrow to see a Democratic wipe-out or a fate worse than the usual mid-term round of losses. Instead, a bizarre turnaround has been effected. Beyond the Republican heartlands, the Starr inquisition seems actually to have helped Bill Clinton. Liberals who had previously kept their distance from the centrist president have rallied to his side. Arthur Miller took to the pages of the New York Times to compare the sexual McCarthyism of Starr to the witch-hunts of Salem, which Miller had immortalised in The Crucible. In the New Yorker, EL Doctorow delivered a sharp, moving appeal to Americans to realise 'that more than partisan politics is going on here... this is the unseating of a democratically elected president with the legitimacy of a coup d'itat'. Nowhere is this newly invigorated support for the president clearest than among black Americans. One poll found he now enjoys 91 per cent support among that community - a community that has stood by him throughout. The explanation was put most arrestingly by the novelist and Nobel laureate, Toni Morrison. She wrote that Monicagate had made Bill Clinton 'our first black president'. He had always been the first white politician to be wholly at ease among African-Americans, but now he, like so many of them, had been hounded by the law, by the Republican Party and by an establishment that wanted to keep him down. Millions of black Americans believe 'the system' will always crush those who speak for them - whether it's Marion Barry, the crack-using mayor of Washington DC, or OJ Simpson - and that Bill Clinton is merely the newest victim. 'We love him and we'll stand by him,' says Toye Moses, 50 years old and among those who've come to Nob Hill to cheer. 'He's done more for African-Americans than any president in history.' In return, Clinton is mimicking the black style of redemptive politics. When Barry returned to the mayor's office after his stint in jail, the first words of his re-inaugural speech rang out: 'Amazing grace, how sweet the sound, that saved a wretch like me.' Now Bill Clinton tells $50,000-a-plate fundraisers in California that his role in the Middle East peace process was 'part of my own journey of contrition'. In San Francisco, he announced: 'I have come back from the doldrums once again to lead America and the world.' The rest of the speech was equally telling. It didn't unveil new policies or give new spending figures - it wasn't even a set-piece speech. But it did serve as a reminder of why Bill Clinton has managed to sustain a 10-month scandal that would have killed most politicians stone-dead, and come out with a record approval rating close to 70 per cent. It reminded you of the winning, smiling young man who swept to the White House in 1992. To put it sappily, it reminded you why America fell in love with Bill Clinton. For one thing, he is still the boy politician. Like a naughty kid, he rejoices in telling the deep-pocket Democrats that the Middle East talks meant he didn't get to bed before three in the morning, and that on the final evening of talks he didn't come home at all. 'I was up for 39 hours before I went to bed last night. I didn't even do that in college.' To laughter, he confesses that because his staff are worried about him being so tired they have prepared little note cards. But Clinton likes making his own speeches. 'So I talked to Hillary and she said, 'read the card, read the card'. ' He pauses. 'But I'm not going to read the card.' The room breaks up. Today he combines the impish adolescent shtick with a dash of lion in winter and grand old man. He confesses he has scribbled on his cards, but 'at my age, in my dilapidated condition, I can't read it anyway'. Still bright, still clear, is the intellect of the man. The goofball antics and the husky accent can sometimes obscure it, but Bill Clinton is extraordinarily smart. Aides swap now-mythic tales of his ability to read books in minutes, to compute vast budget sums in his head while watching a ballgame, to remember the detail of social policy programmes in Alabama or election results in Venezuela. Clinton is good at toning down the 20,000-watt brightness of his brain depending on his audience, and in San Francisco it's turned on to less than full power. But he does speak for 27 minutes without a script in perfect, syntactical sentences - and retains his vote-winning gift for explaining complex ideas in simple, accessible language. So the effort to balance the federal budget is explained as waiting '29 years to go from red ink to black'. The health-care changes Democrats are advocating are necessary because 'the doctor, not the accountant, ought to make the decision'. He describes a project he's seen that gives kids three square meals a day at school. 'And guess what? Learning levels have gone up and juvenile crime has gone down. This is not rocket science.' Above all, Bill Clinton has not lost his almost supernatural gift for empathy. He used to be lampooned for saying 'I feel your pain', but it's a skill which works more subtly than that. Clinton somehow manages to put himself in the shoes of others, and to reach out to them. So even though he's addressing a roomful of multi-millionaires, the president throws in this line: 'You want the people who serve this meal to have their children grow up without asthma, just as well as those who paid the full ticket price.' At that, every waiter and waitress stopped pouring coffee and looked up - they realised the President of the United States was talking about them. Now, maybe that was a cynical ploy. After all, the pundits say the 1998 elections will be swung by 'waitress moms' - parents on low income. But when have you ever seen an after-dinner speaker do that? He talks about the need for health insurance reform, not in the abstract but by imagining himself inside the mind of a health insurance bureaucrat. 'You know you're making a modest salary, you'd like a bonus at Christmas time, you'd like to get a promotion some day...' He mentions Mathew Shepard, the gay man murdered 10 days earlier in Wyoming. 'And I thought, that boy could have been my son.' Finally he says what it all adds up to, the attempt to balance the budget for the sake of America's pensioners, the Israeli-Palestinian peace process, the war on homophobia. 'You may think this is easy enough for me to say because I have no more elections in me. But I promise you, I believe this - the greatest victories we all win in life are not the victories we win over other people. It's the victories we win for our common humanity.' Liberals around the world have been frustrated with Bill Clinton. Not just the recklessness of his clinches with Monica, or legalistic word-twisting of his defence, but the deeper failure to use his presidency to pursue a concrete, progressive ideology. But, when you hear him, you can't help thinking that his goal is better than nothing - the attempt to create a gentler, warmer and more humane world. 'Our common humanity.' And then another thought strikes you. 'I have no more elections in me,' he had said. The rollercoaster ride that began with a brown-haired, sax-playing, shades-wearing southern governor - dipping for Gennifer with a G, the draft and Monica; soaring for peace deals on the White House lawn and in Belfast, re-election and six years of sunshine for the US economy - will soon be over. In two years time, or even sooner, the great Clinton adventure will end. And yet, when the TV programme-makers of the future want to conjure up the 1990s in a few images, it'll be the face of Bill Clinton they show. No one else has spanned the decade quite like him. And, when he's gone, you know what? America will miss him.